Gail Alexan­der

The Dis­as­ter Man­age­ment Units (DMUs) of the var­i­ous re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions are as­sist­ing the Health Min­istry in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of face masks in all mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties to help curb COVID-19 spread.

And as the long East­er hol­i­day week­end ap­proach­es, there’ll be in­creased mu­nic­i­pal po­lice pa­trols across all beach­es and rivers, plus recre­ation grounds, mar­kets, abat­toirs, ceme­ter­ies and cre­ma­tion sites to en­sure the law is obeyed and gath­er­ings are dis­cour­aged un­der an­ti-COVID-19 mea­sures.

This was an­nounced by the Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­istry yes­ter­day. This fol­lowed Gov­ern­ment’s re­cent rec­om­men­da­tion for mem­bers of the pub­lic to wear face cov­er­ings to pre­vent COVID-19 spread and tight­ened re­stric­tions on pub­lic gath­er­ings. Pub­lic gath­er­ings have been cut from 10 to five peo­ple to pre­vent virus spread.

The Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­istry said the DMUs have al­so al­ready col­lect­ed food ham­pers from the So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­istry for dis­tri­b­u­tion to fam­i­lies in need through­out all mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties The units are al­so fa­cil­i­tat­ing pub­lic ser­vice an­nounce­ments in all elec­toral dis­tricts in Trinidad to keep cit­i­zens in­formed of best prac­tices and lat­est de­vel­op­ments.

The min­istry has al­so ad­vised all mu­nic­i­pal cor­po­ra­tions to do the fol­low­ing:

* Dis­sem­i­nate all no­tices re­gard­ing COVID-19 from of­fi­cial Gov­ern­ment chan­nels and health au­thor­i­ties to burgess­es us­ing ap­pro­pri­ate com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels such as mo­bile pub­lic ad­dress sys­tems, so­cial me­dia and fly­ers.

* Con­duct in­for­ma­tion/sen­si­ti­sa­tion ses­sions with all ven­dors, via Pub­lic Health De­part­ments

* In­crease fre­quen­cy of sani­ti­sa­tion ex­er­cis­es

* Where pos­si­ble, in­stall hand sani­tis­er dis­pensers or in­stall hand­wash­ing sta­tions

* Pri­ori­tise truck-borne wa­ter/wa­ter truck­ing de­liv­er­ies to vul­ner­a­ble burgess­es, es­pe­cial­ly in rur­al com­mu­ni­ties

* En­gage ex­ist­ing vol­un­teer net­works to gar­ner the sup­port of all stake­hold­ers, in­clud­ing cor­po­rate cit­i­zens (busi­ness as­so­ci­a­tions and cham­bers of com­merce) in sup­port of per­sons in need and those be­ing af­fect­ed by the eco­nom­ic slow­down.

The min­istry has al­so ad­vised burgess­es to con­tact their Pub­lic Health Units for in­for­ma­tion and ad­vice as the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion evolves.